"Constant, Constant, Multi-tasking Craziness": Managing Multiple Working SpheresAssociate Professor Gloria Mark Friday 26th March 2004 at 10am *** Note unusual day and time *** AbstractMost current designs of information technology are based on the notion of supporting distinct tasks such as document production, email usage, and voice communication. In this talk we present empirical results that suggest that people organize their work in terms of much larger and thematically connected units of work. We present results of fieldwork observation of information workers in three different roles: analysts, software developers, and managers. We discovered that all of these types of workers experience a high level of discontinuity in the execution of their activities. People average about three minutes on a task and somewhat more than two minutes using any electronic tool or paper document before switching tasks. We introduce the concept of working spheres to explain the inherent way in which individuals conceptualize and organize their basic units of work. People worked in an average of ten different working spheres. Working spheres are also fragmented; people spend about 12 minutes in a working sphere before they switch to another. We argue that design of information technology needs to support people's continual switching between working spheres. Short resumeGloria Mark is an Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics, School of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology at Columbia University and then worked as a research scientist at the Electronic Data System Capture Lab, one of the first electronic meeting room environments. She then worked at the German National Institute for Information Technology (GMD) in Bonn, Germany from 1994-2000. She joined the faculty at UC Irvine in 2000. Her research focuses on the interaction of technology and human behavior in the area of Computer-Supported Collaborative Work. She mainly investigates how social practices are impacted by technology use in distance collaboration. She applies both laboratory and field study methods in her work. Other research interests include technology adoption by distributed teams, empirical studies of requirements analysis, collaborative information visualization, and time management in information work. She serves on the editorial boards of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, and e-commerce Quarterly, and has served on numerous program committees and also reviewing panels for the National Science Foundation. |